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The Practice of Equality

The Practice of Equality

Samuel Scheffler

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331109.003.0002

This Chapter discusses two views of equality: the distributive view and the relational view. According to the first view, equality is an essentially distributive value. We can directly assess distributions as being more or less egalitarian, and justice requires that we strive to achieve fully egalitarian distributions, except insofar as other values forbid it. According to the relational view, equality is an ideal governing certain kinds of interpersonal relationships. It plays a central role in political philosophy because justice requires the establishment of a society of equals, a society whose members relate to one another on a footing of equality. This chapter develops the relational view in greater detail and argues that it is not, contrary to what some have suggested, merely a variant of the distributive view.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 March 2018